IT 386: 3D Modeling and Animation. Review Sheet. Notes from Professor Nersesian s IT 386: 3D Modeling and Animation course

IT 386: 3D Modeling and Animation Review Sheet

Sources:

 Notes from Professor Nersesian’s IT 386: 3D Modeling and Animation course

 Notes from CannedMushrooms on YouTube

 Notes from Digital Tutors tutorial videos Technical help:

1. Mental Ray not Loading up:

a. Go to WindowSettings/PreferencesPlug-in Manager then find the mentarayForMaya2015 folder and click on Loaded and Auto load

2. Maya 2015 Keep Faces Together Changed:

a. Maya 2015 moved where you can select keep faces together or not. It’s now under the settings menu which is a real pain and useless to use over and over. The best way right now is to do your extrusion and then in the channel box, find the extrusion under inputs and you can change keep faces together there.

3. Turn on two-sided lighting

a. Lighting  two-sided lighting

 Every object has to have a material attached to it or it won’t be rendered

 Default lighting is present in Maya

 When you model something, you want the z to be positive

 By default, each unit in the world grid is a centimeter

 To change this to meters, go to settings  preferences  working units  meters

 Most game engines work in meters

 To duplicate an object, do CTRL + D

 Right click on an object to get a context-sensitive menu:

o Object mode – for whole object

o Vertex mode – a vertex is just a point in 3D space (lowest level of an object). Vertices only contain xyz position in 3D space.

o Edge mode – a edge is a line defined by two vertices.

 W key  move

 E key  rotate

 R key  scale

 Select tool  used to select objects and components

 Be careful of backfacing  don’t accidentally select components in the back

 X-ray button lets you see through objects to avoid selecting the back components of what you don’t want to.

 3 edges or more can define a polygon

 Polygon = face

 N-gons – 5 sides or more

 STICK WITH QUADS  4 SIDED POLYGONS

 Retopology  reforming and building over your mesh a lot

 Faces are one sided  to see the normals do:

o Display  polygons  face normal

 Outliner  list of the stuff you have in the scene

 Usually 16 subdivisions of game objects

 NURBS  a mixture of curves

 Press B key for the soft select tool

 Hold down B and click + drag for larger/smaller area to be affected by the soft selection

 Press SPACE to toggle between 4 view and single mode

 4 cameras  perspective, top, front, and side

 White edging around a view means that you have the camera of that view selected

 Tumbling  changing your perspective; rotating the view

 To combine two objects, select both of the objects then go to mesh  combine

 2 ways to fix an object’s pivot:

o 1. Modify  center pivot

o 2. Insert Key and hold V to snap pivot to any point

 NURBS are the 3D equivalent of vector lines

 With Boolean difference, the first object you select is the one that remains, the second one is the object that gets cut out.

 SELECTION HOTKEYS:

o Q  activates the selection tool o CTRL + CLICK  deselect o Object/Component  F8 o Vertex  F9

o Edge  F10 o Face  F11

o Grow selection  >

o Shrink selection  <

 To select an edge loop, click an edge then SHIFT + double click an adjacent edge to select that edge loop OR go to select  edge loop

 Before smoothing, you can add edge loops to maintain the volume of your object

 Box Modeling:

o Starting with a primitive o Roughing out the shape

o Adding edge loops and smoothing

 Rendering and Render Engines

o Rendering  the process of developing your final-quality image o Render Engines

 Maya Software:

 Quick, simple, comes in handy for motion graphics and cartoon style (not photo-realistic)

 Mental Ray:

 Takes longer to render a similar image, a lot more calculations, much

more realistic with light and reflections  creates photo-realistic end results!

o Never close the output window, always just minimize it!!!!  or you will have to reload the Mental Ray plugin (instructions at top of review sheet under technical help section).

o Common tab  available for every render engine in Maya

o Renderable camera  choose which camera you will render from

o Passes tab  allows us to separate layers to meet our needs o Features  quick place to turn on/off render features

o Quality tab  the higher the quality, the longer the renders will take

 Lambert  color + bump

 Blinn  color + bump + specular shading

 UVW Mapping o What is a UV?

 A UV is the surface of our polygon (texture space)

 UV  one direction W  another direction

 Why do we need to unwrap UVWs?

 To control the distribution/spread of our texture.

 When you delete edges, it leaves vertices behind  use delete edge vertex

 CTRL + G  to group objects

 Substances  procedural textures

 Specular maps  how shiny parts are

 Bump/Normal Map  makes 1 polygon have many normal

 Diffuse map  base color map

 For best 3D results, have a clean underlying geometry and apply diffuse, specular, and normal maps to a 3D object

 Lambert  simple material  only has a color channel

 A default set of UVs comes with every polygon primitive you create

 Cgtextures.com  royalty free, free (price) textures.

 Create UVs  UV map editor

 Overlapping UVs don’t matter (in Maya)

 In the game engine, if you want to bake lighting down, you CAN’T overlap textures

 Specular rolloff  how strong in one area is that highlight

 Eccentricity  how large will your highlight be?

 Dropoff  similar to eccentricity

o Metal  high rolloff, low eccentricity

o MAT/Dull material  low rolloff, high eccentricity

 Making game props is all about layering

 Render settings  for a portfolio, aim for HD 720

 Select object and press F key to frame the object

 Modeling Techniques

o When modeling, always look at the biggest parts first

o Multicut tool  useful for adding edges between 2 points (“cutting” the geometry) o Box modeling  modeling starting out with a primitive object (usually a cube)

 Great for modeling game props and environments

 Key tools are the cube primitive, insert edge loop tool and extrude tool

 Can smooth the geometry after you box model it

 To make a more “game-ready” sphere, take a cube and do mesh smooth

 To add more polygons to the cube, keep it selected and hit the G key

 To make a cylinder that is “game-ready” insert an edge loop at the top and bottom of a cube and then do mesh smooth

 Great resource for box modeling game ready primitives 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0o89lsyhq7w&list=PL9MUC- YxhJ6Cvb24IKP2Ze_2o66q8C0nZ&index=4&spfreload=10